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All Four Stars by Tara Dairman

This is a delightful book about a young girl who is passionate
about cooking. Unfortunately, she ends up setting the kitchen curtains ablaze
and is grounded by her fast food loving parents. Before she can get back to the
kitchen Gladys has to start behaving like 'normal' girl, make some friends and play with them.
As a school assignment she writes a letter of application to work as a food
critic. It somehow manages to cross the desk of the food editor who hires her
as a freelancer to review a cake shop. How she will manage to accomplish this
is something you will have to read the book to find out.

What I liked about this book:

It's a perfectly fun elementary school novel. It shows characters as
multidimensional. I was worried at first at how the parents are portrayed. (reminiscent of Matilda's parents from the Roald Dahl novel) Thankfully they
are seen to be quite reasonable and even flexible adults by the end of the
book. Did I mention that I liked the ending to this one? I like that her
parents ended up getting what they wanted for Gladys, but Gladys got what she
needed also.

What I didn't like:

About two thirds through, I started wanting to see the recipes for
all the fabulous food Gladys was cooking up. Alas, they are not in the book.
They are available at Daiman's websitehere, but I would have liked
for them to have been in the book either within the specific chapter or in an
appendix.

About Me

Across my teaching career I have taught combinations of mixed age groupings from kindergarten to grade 5. I was an ESL teacher for a number of years and am now a teacher librarian at Charles Dickens Elementary School in Vancouver, B.C.